Rowboat Sailor

Unification had rubbed some of the luster off the post of Secretary of the Navy, and made it harder to fill. Last week when Harry Truman nominated Francis Patrick Matthews for the job, the first question Washington newsmen had to ask was: Who is he?

They soon found out: he was a bald, ruddy lawyer, a wealthy Omaha Democrat--and the third man considered for the job. Harry Truman had wanted North Carolina's Jonathan Daniels, whose father had been Woodrow Wilson's Navy Secretary. Daniels didn't want the job. Democratic National Committee Chairman J. Howard McGrath had his own candidate --his friend, Judge Robert Quinn of Rhode Island. But Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson didn't want Quinn. In raising funds for Harry Truman's campaign, Johnson had got a good look at Frank Matthews and liked what he saw.

For one thing, Matthews was a loyal member of the party. He had helped draft the President's civil rights program, and at the Philadelphia convention he firmly whipped the Nebraska delegation back into line when some of its members wanted to desert Truman. The President, accepting Louis Johnson's man, sent his nomination to the Senate, on the same day he sent up the names of Gordon Gray, 39-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Army, to be Under Secretary of the Army, and California's easygoing Dan Kimball, to be promoted from Assistant to Under Secretary of the Navy.

The Navy assignment would be 62-year-old Frank Matthews' first big public job. After developing a good law practice in Omaha, he had branched out into business, become head of two loan companies, vice president of a radio-TV station, a director of other corporations. A devout Roman Catholic (he had a chapel built in his home so that priests could say Mass there), he was once supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus. In 1944 Pope Pius XII made him a Papal Chamberlain with Cape and Sword, a post entitling him to serve a turn of duty on the Vatican staff if he ever wants to.

Frank Matthews looked like the solid, conservative type the Senate would confirm without much fuss. Nebraska's two Republican Senators, Kenneth Wherry and Hugh Butler, liked him. A handful of liberal Senators, led by Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey, were less happy about the President's choice. They remembered Matthews from 1946, when he sparkplugged a U.S. Chamber of Commerce campaign to paint Communist Red on the Administration and on union labor.

Like most civilian secretaries before him, Matthews was a little slim on nautical background, but hoped to learn. Said Landlubber Matthews: "I do have a rowboat at my summer home."

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